How to: Secure your World of Warcraft account

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You love to play World of Warcraft, but one day you go to log in but you can’t get in. For some reason your password just doesn’t work. Your WoW friends report you’ve been a bit weird lately, perhaps you’ve been ninja’ing stuff from the Guild Vault or been rude in guild chat? You look on the armory and find your character is naked and all that epic gear has mysteriously disappeared. What’s happened? You’ve been hacked.

Preventable

For anyone who has been through this experience or one like it, it’s a sickening feeling. It can often take a long time to get your account back (some cases you can’t) and the process of doing so involves having to prove ownership of that account to Blizzard – not so easy if you don’t have things like your original game serial numbers to hand. Even when you get your account back there’s the delay in GameMasters checking what stuff you had and returning it to you which will impact your play.

Of course, there are the usual safeguards like not sharing your account, not using public PCs, not having a simple password etc, but the only sure fire way of guaranteeing your account isn’t compromised is to get a Blizzard Authenticator.

There are two forms of the authenticator.

Paid version
Costs Â£4.80/â‚¬6 plus shipping. To get the paid or version, visit this link.Â (EU customers). In exchange for the very little cost you’ll get a key fob that generates a 6 digit code when you press a button.

Free version
Costs nothing. Can be installed on iPhones, iPod touch, Nokia handsets, Sony handsets and more coming soon. Once installed and linked to your Battle.net account it will generate an 8 digit code when opened.

How do you use it?

You link your chosen authenticator with your Battle.net account and each time you log in, not only will you have to put your password in, but you’ll have to provide the number on the screen of your authenticator too. Simple, but unhackable.

If we could make it a requirement for everyone in our guild to have one, we would, but sadly there is no method for being able to prove whether or not someone has one. Don’t forget, if you get hacked and items get taken from your guild vault, it’s not just your game that’s affected, but others too. There is no excuse and anyone who’s been hacked will tell you that you can’t put a price on your account security. Please, if you don’t have one already – get one now.